The context of this poem is a bit complex. I wanted to experiment with some poetic gymnastics to venture into new terrain, like writing from the perspective of non-living things. So I chose The Communist Manifesto. Such a paradoxical choice, I must say in hindsight.
I first (and sadly, the last time) read it many years ago, sometime in 2019, when I was in my second (and final) year before university (though I never actually went to university, another detour we can explore some other time). I was at Edwardes College then (see the post “Against Platonic Love” for more details).
The idea for the poem surfaced after watching a dogfight — intellectually speaking — between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you haven’t already, I recommend watching their full debate.
Since 2019, I haven’t read the book again. Not because I don’t want to, but because the emotional baggage it carries would unsettle me. You know, like a young dove that once saw a wild cat.
Still, I folded a page, marking a paragraph between two lines of pencil marks. That was back when I refused to use pens on my books. The paragraph reads:
“In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accmulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.”
motheaten:
5 years since anyone saw me,
Gagging under piles of
scientific scribblings,
In the wild, diagon alleys of
this old city —
shabby, grimy, motheaten.
It was 1917,
And afterward, in this terrain,
Till the Devta of Hasshtnagr [1] reigned,
Vivacious eyes adorned me.
A few went cross,
Yet still, they devour and scathed my words.
And now even paper worms are indifferent,
With the city’s pauper miserying,
Devastation and sheer injustice in the air,
And loonies dive into smorgasbords;
My redness is fading;
I am futile now!
Note: Poem from the perspective of a preloved, devastated copy of the Communist Manifesto, longing to be read in Chakagali (a labyrinthine street in Peshawar known for its second-hand book stalls)
[1] Afzal Bangash (founder of Mazdoor Kissan Party in Hashtnagr, Charsadda)